Fake "Fur"

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *

If I made up a list of the trends in American cinema that if continued over time could eventually turn my love of the medium into a distant memory and a dull headache scoring high would be Behind the Music-ification of the biopic (pronounced to rhyme with 'myopic' with no irony intended). In the past, these formulaic twaddles would have been pipelined for television (and eventually, righteous obscurity) but now with slightly improved cinematography and a flush of new credibility they now make the sky turn black with raining Oscars.

Part of this is no doubt due to our ease to accept that accomplished people's lives can be boiled down to two or three elements that are worth remembering: John Nash was crazy and smart, Queen Elizabeth doesn't smile and is very British, Idi Amin was totally scary and from Africa, Ray Charles sang and was blind, June Carter was married to Johnny Cash or something, Edward R. Murrow was really serious, Capote talked kind of odd = Cut. Print. Exalt.

With that in mind, Fur, an original story that shirks all previous biographies and expectations about one of American's most controversial photographers setting her in a 1950s Greenwich Village fairy tale, held much promise.

Unfortunately for Diane Arbus and viewers alike, writer/director team Erin Cressida Wilson and Steven Shainberg (Secretary) have built careers on taking women who would be considered too quirky (by the fairly banal brackets of our society) and filing down their edges under the mantle of fake proto-feminism. Charmed, as it were, by its own quirkiness, their fairy tale of choice is the already problematic Beauty and the Beast [as a counterpoint, see: Saving Beauty from the Beast]. The beast role filled out by Robert Downey, Jr. with a genetic condition that makes him inordinately hairy while the beauty - Nicole Kidman - has become here a de-Semitised, hyper-feminine, brooding housewife with dreams of becoming a photographer but a pathological fear of touching a camera or making any kind of creative decision.

The bulk of the film is spent drudging through a surprisingly tepid romance (there is a palpable anti-chemistry between Kidman and Downey, Jr.) with a seemingly endless number of scenes of the hairy man pointing Arbus's camera for her intercut with scenes from her home life: lying to her husband about her increasingly dull affair and tucking her children into bed while gazing into the middle-distance with a single tear running down her cheek.

The cast is deeply committed to this material but Fur is so unevenly directed every note the film strikes is cold, sloppy, overly precious or just plain dumb. There is a scene near the end that is so absurdly over the top it has some merit as a closing fantasy sequence until the viewer realizes it's not only being quite literal but that the story will sputter on for another fifteen uncomfortable minutes. One almost wonders if Cressida Wilson and Shainberg don't have a few ancestors who were exploited by the real Arbus and they chose to exact their revenge with a filmic belittling that becomes something akin to slow drip water torture.

DVD extras include director commentary, deleted scenes and theatrical trailer.

See instead: Marie Antoinette, All That Jazz, In the Cut, Human Nature, Color Me Kubrick.